Again, no spoilers. You’ll have to wait until Tina and I do an episode about the Harry Potter series on Television Zombies — and yes, that is a plug.

It’s been two days since I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I’m afflicted with a strange sense of loss. I’m reminded of the long car trip home after my two week stay at the Duke University Young Writers camp — slouched in the back seat, trying to do anything but think about the fact that all the friendships I’ve just made were over forever.

Although I wouldn’t consider myself an uber fan of Harry Potter, I was very fond of the books. I looked forward to them and formed my own (mostly correct) theories about what was to come. The thing that makes literarture so much more powerful than televison or film is the strange sense of ownership a reader has over books. With the story acted out in one’s imagination, it becomes a part of you. I feel like Harry, Ron, Hermione, Ginny, Luna, Neville, Dobby, Sirius, Lupin, Dumbledore, etc. etc., etc. are all mine, despite the fact that the only books more beloved by the human race are religious texts. Millions love these books, but since reading is a solitary activity, each of us feels a proprietary interest stronger than say the love Star Wars fans have for that series.

And now that Harry’s adventures are over, I will miss seeing him and his friends every two years. I didn’t think I would be so affected by the series’ end, but I am. I look forward to sharing it with my girls when they’re old enough, of taking them on a ride through all the wonderful moments and surprises, but for me, there will be no new revelations. I know everything there is to know. And it makes me feel a little sad.

I am currently 165 pages into HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS.

Body count so far: 4

I’ve written extensively about Cormac McCarthy’s THE ROAD, and my feelings about it, so I won’t go into it here.

However, if you’ve an interest in a rare interview with him, you can view it online here. Yes, it’s at Oprah’s site, and yes you have to register, but it’s worth it.

There’s a moment in the interview, when she asks him if his son influenced the book. His response, so open and honest, made me totally reconceptualize the book. THE ROAD is about the inherent goodness of the author’s young son — it is about the love he feels for his child, and his hope that that love would persevere the worst possible world.

In his reaction, I finally understood. As a parent, as someone who thinks quite often about his own children, I got it.

Anyway, if you’ve read the book, it’s worth reading.

So, I just finished the extraordinary novel SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson. It seems now that every Christmas I’m innundated with a supply of Borders gift cards, which I use to buy about a dozen or so books. SPIN was near the top of the stack, but it took me quite a long time to get to it.

“Breathtaking,” says the blurb from Publisher’s Weekly on the cover. I have to agree. I step away with a sense of satisfaction I haven’t gotten from a novel in quite awhile, and a genuine sadness for parting ways with its engaging characters.

SPIN is a story of three children — Tyler, the narrator, and Jason and Diane, twin siblings — and the effect on their lives of a cosmic event called “Spin.” On one cold winter night, the three are out stargazing when the stars suddenly go out and the sky turns black. The Earth is encased within a membrane that slows the passage of time, with millions of years in the universe passing on Earth within minutes. As the three age and find their lives linked to cosmic forces greater than themselves, it becomes apparent that someday soon the sun will die, as will all life on Earth.

To say more will spoil the novel, but readers looking for a great hard science fiction novel about human relationships should look no further. Permeated with sadness and longing, SPIN is a remarkable read. I’m probably going to put reading aside for the next few weeks until the release of the final HARRY POTTER novel. It would be unfair to compare lesser works to this beautiful book.

I finally finished up Charles Stross’ ACCELERANDO late last week. Although it was filled with some amazing ideas, I’m afraid I can’t endorse it as a coherent novel. I’m still not quite sure what I read, or what the point of the book was. Something vaguely to do with post humans threatening organic life in the universe, possibly even effecting the universe on a subatomic level.

Still, you can’t beat ideas like a mission to find an extraterrestrial internet, accessible from a router in orbit around a brown dwarf star, or lawsuits used as a denial of service attack to businesses, or a man uploading a copy of his consciousness into a flock of artificial pigeons.

Next up: THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE by Max Brooks. Light reading, to say the least.

I continue to be haunted by Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” a book I read last year over the Christmas holiday. It’s a sign of a truly great work that its images still trouble me months after I read it. But just because the book is genius does not mean that I enjoyed it, or even liked it. Honestly, I wish I never read it at all.

Set in a nightmarish post-apocalyptic America, “The Road” follows a father and his young son as they struggle to survive in a canabilistic wasteland, where the majority of survivors, as few as they are, prey on travelers, enslave the weak, and raise human beings as livestock. Most of the book follows their relatively mundane struggle for survivor — scavanging for food in the ruins, wandering through ash-stained snow — but is punctuated by moments of terror as they encounter other survivors.

Cormac McCarthy is renowned for his cynical views on mankind, and “The Road” is perhaps the apotheosis of his world view, offering only glimmers of kindness amidst unspeakable savagery.

I know I’ve written about it before, but it’s interesting how much this book has lingered in my subconscious. It flickers up into my dreams, into my thoughts, even in my day-to-day interactions with strangers. Good art is supposed to leave an impact, but I can’t help feeling violated by “The Road.” There are images in the book I’d rather not remember, yet I see the scenes clearly in my memory as if I’d lived them myself.

I’m struggling to get through Charles Stross’ “Accelerando,” a brilliant book to be sure, but not a work of art on the level of “The Road.” It’s hard to go back to literature for entertainment after being gutted by literature as art. Even if that book, like the fabled Necronomicon of H.P. Lovecraft, should never be read by mortals.

I spent the past four days at my mother’s house, with nothing to do but read. So I read “World war Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War” by Max Brooks. Wow. It’s been quite a long time since I read a book that had this kind of an impact on me.

Not a novel in the traditional sense, Brooks writes “World War Z” as if he was Stephen Ambrose documenting World War II. The story unfolds through interviews with survivors of the zombie war, which in this alternate history, was a George Romero-esque plague that wiped out most of humanity. Each chapter is almost like a monologue or short story, giving readers one more glimpse of the bigger picture. Interviewees include mercenaries, soldiers, naval officers, doctors, Japense otaku, a blind gardener and even former Democratic presidential candidate and current DNC chair Howard Dean, each one adding to the global perspective of the story. Unlike typical zombie films, most notably George Romero’s “Living Dead” series, or “28 Days Later,” we are aware of the big picture, rather than the desperate last days of a handful of human survivors.

The resulting work is nothing short of brilliant. Unlike other zombie stories, which typically describe how even under the most horrific of circustances, human beings are willing to turn on each other, “World War Z” shows human beings at their best. In effect, Brooks takes the zombie genre and subverts it. Within this book are acts of horror, yes, but also acts of great heroism and bravery.

I wish I could put into words just how surprised I was by this book. By its characters, by its politics, by its big ideas and action set pieces a thousand times more interesting than anything Hollywood could produce. Twelve hours after finishing it, I can’t help but be haunted by what I read. The images linger, which is something I can’t say for the last few books I’ve read.

Highly recommended.

Wow, I just finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. It’s one of those books that uncannily creates a narrator whose voice is so compelling that you question whether or not he/she is really fictional. In this case, it’s a 15-year-old autistic boy named Christopher, who sets out to find the murderer of a neighborhood dog, a quest that has very personal ramifications.

I once read that the Dude in The Big Liebowski was created to be an unlikely detective, a man incapable of understanding the complexities of the mystery he was trying to solve. Christopher, I must say, is considerably less equipped than the Dude.

I don’t want to get into too much detail about the plot of the book, because there are a lot of surprises and twists, and if I even hint about them, I’ll ruin it. But I will say that I now know much more about autism than I ever thought I would, and Haddon’s deft use of language really gets across the confusion autistics feel when confronted with a world they simply aren’t capable of understanding. Simple things, like finding a new place, take on a tremendous mathematical complexity for Christopher. Yet, there are times when he is surprisingly normal, at least in his feelings and his reactions, but he doesn’t know how to interpret his feelings.

To sum things up, I’m glad to say that the hype about this book is true — it really is a fantastic read, and not what I expected.

So, I just finished up reading Jack McDevitt’s “Polaris,” the follow-up to the classic “A Talent for War,” and I have to say that I have never been so disappointed in a writer.

“A Talent for War” was a brilliant fusion of hard science fiction to the mystery genre, loaded with big ideas, great characters and political commentary. In brief, “A Talent for War” followed far future antiquities dealer Alex Benedict, as he sought to unravel the mystery of what really happened to one of his society’s greatest war heroes. It quite deftly forced the reader to question the established historical record and see that sometimes it’s very difficult to separate objective history from populist mythology. When I got to the end of the book and the answer to its final mystery, I was completely floored — almost every element in the book was perfect. It’s also worth mentioning that even though it was published in 1989, “A Talent for War” still offered a believable far future society and lacked the anachronisms that can sometimes kill a classic science fiction novel.

“Polaris” begins some 15 years after the original, featuring the further adventures of Alex Benedict and his assistant Chase Kolpath (the book’s female narrator) as they seek to figure out what happened to the passengers of the luxury yacht Polaris who disappeared shortly after witnessing a celestial event. Like a futuristic Marie Celeste, the ship was completely intact, with the all of the belongings of the passengers still aboard.

Despite a rollicking opening chapter, the book quickly falls into the familiar forumla employed in modern thrillers such as “The Davinci Code.” The science fiction elements were brief, the world that was developed in “A Talent for War” appeared hollow and superficial in this one, and I had a really difficult time believing in the authenticity of the female narrator. Chase Kolpath speaks and thinks like a man.

What’s worse, many of the things that happened in the first book (Alex’s house is broken into and robbed, their spinner [aka flying car] is sabatagoed, etc.) happen in this one. What’s more, although Alex Benedict was a great and compelling protagonist in “A Talent for War,” by making Chase the narrator, he’s almost a cipher in this one.

I’ve heard great things abotu McDevitt’s “space opera” novels, and one bad book won’t keep me from trying his other work, but I have to say I’m much less enthusiastic about cracking open his other books after struggling to finish this one. I’m certainly not going to buy the third “Benedict/Kolpath” novel, “Seeker” in hardback. If it’s anything like “Polaris,” it’s definitely not going to be worth cover price.

Final verdict on “Polaris”: ** 1/2

Post script: I’m happy that the Nebula Awards voters had the good sense to award this year’s “Best Novel” award to Joe Haldeman’s “Camouflage” and not Jack McDevitt’s “Polaris.” If this is the best science fiction has to offer, I’d hate to see the worst.

Well, I finally finished “Coyote.” Being a fused set of connected, though separate, short stories, the book was pretty incoherent as a novel in the traditional sense. And although I still found a lot of it to be tedious, the opening and closing sections were pretty good. The twist ending especially was a great payoff — I don’t want to spoil the book for anyone, but it definitely ended well. It wasn’t a twist in the “Twilight Zone” sense, but it was definitely a nice surprise, and served as a nice counterpoint to the first chapter — clearly Alan Steele intends “Coyote” as a libertarian parable, and so that readers wouldn’t confuse “libertarian” with “liberal,” he shows that his philosphy isn’t simply the antithesis of hard right conservatism, but hard left communism as well. “Coyote” doesn’t exactly do for libertarianism what “His Dark Materials” does for atheism, but the potential was there. Perhaps its sequels do a better job.

Besides the politics, there were also some nice high science fiction concepts introduced as well. Again, they were a surprise, so I won’t spoil them.

But the book has its failings — the characters were largely flat, and some of the interpersonal conflicts, particularly among the teenagers, lacked credibility. Ultimately, a good science fiction novel rests on three pillars — the plot, the high concept, and the characters. “Coyote” had the high concept, but the plot and characters were largely missing. That made it pretty much a bore, but the good parts were really good.

Next up: Jack McDevitt’s “Polaris,” or Russell Banks’ “The Darling.” Decisions, decisions.